NurtureShock

(Twelve; 336 pages; $24.99)

Parents often rely on two things when they go about the complex business of raising children: instinct and conventional wisdom. When instinct and the culture's knowledge about caring for babies don't magically kick in, new parents suffer a panic commonly referred to as "nurture shock."

San Francisco writer Po Bronson and Los Angeles journalist Ashley Merryman play off this term for the title of their fascinating new book, "NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children." The jolt they're delivering is that much of the conventional wisdom about children and child rearing is based on outdated theories and studies often influenced by incorrect assumptions and wishful thinking.

The good news is that scientific research over the past 10 years has illuminated our understanding of how children develop and behave. But because these significant findings have been overlooked, unenlightened practices in parenting, education and public policy persist. The authors, who have collaborated on articles about the science of parenting for New York and Time magazines, throw open the doors on this research to create a book that is not only groundbreaking but compelling as well. Even if you don't have children, or your kids are grown, you should find the revelations about how the brain works and the rigors and frustrations of the scientific process captivating.

Bronson, whose 2003 book, "What Should I Do With My Life?" was a best-seller, narrates the book in his voice, sprinkling it with anecdotes about his two small children and speaking of Merryman in the third person. He shares stories of her meeting with a researcher in one city while he's across the country looking into another aspect of the same issue.

This lends an intimate, investigative tone to the proceedings, as we see them both doggedly digging for answers to confounding questions such as how babies develop language, whether intelligence tests in kindergarten are accurate predictors of future academic success, why siblings fight, why sending kids to ethnically diverse schools is not enough to ensure that kids will form friendships across racial lines and why modern, involved parents are not producing nicer children.

Three of the chapters expand on controversial pieces the co-authors wrote for New York magazine. The first is about how constantly praising your kids is backfiring and actually undermining their confidence. The second gives us all the scientific ammunition we'd ever need to tell our kids why they need a good night's sleep, including sleep deprivation's relationship to depression (getting less than eight hours of sleep doubled the rate of clinical depression in high school students nationally) and academic performance gaps: "Teens who received A's averaged about fifteen minutes more sleep than the B students, who in turn averaged fifteen more minutes than the C's, and so on." It also contains shockers like this one from University of Virginia researcher Dr. Paul Suratt: "Sleep disorders can impair children's IQ as much as lead exposure."

A third chapter explores why kids lie and shows that socially savvy kids find lying a successful way to gain power and stay on top and that typical strategies to promote honesty only encourage kids to be better liars.

The book's subtitle could have been the old Firesign Theatre phrase, "Everything you know is wrong." As Bronson says in the introduction, "We chose these topics because the research surprised us - it directly challenged the conventional point of view on how kids grow up."

Quoting study after study could have been a dry academic exercise in other hands, but Bronson, with his gentle, conversational style, lays out every conundrum clearly, and shows all the steps the researchers took to ensure accurate results, including tweaking their testing methods when results were inconclusive or seemed flawed. In a sense, it's "Science for Dummies" - explaining cutting-edge research to a lay readership. But it's riveting.

Comments welcome

Beginning Monday, three chapters of "NurtureShock" will be posted at PoBronson.com, Nur tureshock.com and Twelvebooks.com, and readers will be invited to annotate the chapters online. Reader footnotes will be added to the chapters, which will go on sale for $2.95 as a PDF.